


On the Anniversary of a Fire, 1991.

by Greensilver (Trelkez)



Category: Miracles (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-21
Updated: 2009-12-21
Packaged: 2017-10-04 22:39:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,186
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/34861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trelkez/pseuds/Greensilver
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>His books contained stories of men who'd drowned on dry land; he didn't doubt that it was entirely possible for a man to burn to death where no fire existed.</p>
            </blockquote>





	On the Anniversary of a Fire, 1991.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deejay](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deejay/gifts).



The room was empty.

If Alva's research held true, she should have been there, in that room. Instead, he only saw charred wood and debris, everywhere he looked. Where the ceiling should have been, he saw the ragged edges of fire-seared planks in silhouette against the night sky; the roof was long gone, and the second story with it.

He could almost smell the house burning as he stood there, examining its remains: wood smoke, hot metal, melting plastic. He could almost—

No, not almost; he _could_ smell it, all of it.

A tiny, soot-stained hand grasped his.

Ah. There she was.

"Father," she whispered, tugging at his hand. "Father, the smoke."

Alva closed his eyes for a moment, tightening his grip on the smooth wood beads of his rosary. When he looked down, a young girl in a frilly sort of dress stared back up at him, her brown eyes wide.

"The smoke," she said again, her voice rising, high and frightened.

"Yes, I see it," Alva said, slowly crouching down next to her. He _did_ see it: smoke was curling into the room, filling it with a thickening gray haze. "I'm sorry."

She was so_ small_. If he reached out and picked her up, she would weigh hardly anything; he could carry her out of the house with no trouble at all, long before the fire reached her.

But this fire had happened long ago, and she was already dead. He was decades too late to save her.

If he dwelled on that, it would probably scare the hell out of him.

"Father, please." He shouldn't have been able to feel her hand on his, but he could. He'd always imagined the presence of a ghost would be cold -- cold spots were well documented, after all -- but her touch was fire-hot. "Please help me."

The smell of wood smoke had become so strong that Alva could almost taste it. The room was getting hotter, unbearably so, and dense black smoke was pouring in now, as if there were actual flames just outside the room, just beyond a door that no longer existed.

Ashes and soot swirled in the smoke, settling on his clothes, on the girl's long blonde ringlets. He was breathing it in; he could feel it sinking into his lungs, choking out the air. At the rate events were currently unfolding, the room would be engulfed in remembered flames in a matter of minutes, and he didn't know whether or not he'd feel that, too.

His books contained stories of men who'd drowned on dry land; he didn't doubt that it was entirely possible for a man to burn to death where no fire existed.

He had to get out.

"Please help me," the girl said again, clutching his hand. She was coughing, too, gasping in the same smoke. Perhaps she'd suffocated before the fire had reached her; his research was unclear on that point. "_Please_."

He couldn't just leave her to die alone. Not again, not when she so clearly didn't know that she was already dead.

Alva said the first thing that came to mind.

"May the Lord in His love and mercy help you—" Was it possible to give Last Rites to a ghost? What else was he supposed to do -- an exorcism? He wasn't certain a place could be possessed by a spirit the way a person could: his books indicated that hauntings were something else, less to do with malevolent spirits and more with the restless dead.

More to the point, he didn't know how to_ do_ an exorcism, unless one counted his cursory and rather derisive examination of Malachi Martin.

"—Help you, with the grace of the Holy Spirit." His hand moved swiftly in the air in front of the girl, disturbing the smoke that swirled around them both. "May the Lord -- the Lord, who frees you from sin—" He couldn't stop coughing. He had to fight it; this wasn't _real_. He wasn't going to suffocate in a room full of breathable air. "—Save you, and raise you up."

She just stared at him in blank terror, gasping for air.

"I'm sorry," he said hoarsely, shaking his head. "I'm sorry, there's nothing I can—"

She threw both arms around his neck. Every point of contact felt like a tongue of flame. He screamed, unable to hold it back -- he was on fire, on _fire_, logic be damned -- and she wailed, nearly drowning him out.

"I'm sorry," Alva cried out, trying to tear her arms away from him. "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry—"

He was dying, he was sure of it. Just like those men who'd drowned on dry land.

He gasped in one last breath of smoke, and collapsed.

* * *

  
When Alva awoke, the fire was gone, and so was the girl. Nothing was left but the charred rubble of the room, every bit as desolate as it had been before the fire had begun to manifest.

He hadn't burned to death, after all. He didn't know if it had been a near miss, or if the possibility of burning to death had existed only in his frightened imagination.

He experimentally took a slow, deep breath.

Well, then.

After a moment Alva reached out an arm, patting the floor until he found the spot where he'd dropped his rosary. He wound it around his hand, closing his fingers tightly around it. His mother's hands had worn down the rosewood beads over the course of years; it wouldn't do for him to lose it now.  
_  
I'm rather out of sorts just now, Lord, so if you wouldn't mind passing along some guidance, your humble servant would be most grateful. _

He waited a moment, listening.

Nothing.  
_  
I'm not quite sure how to categorize what I saw, or how to define it. Any advice you might have would be welcome, Lord._

Still nothing.

He hadn't really expected an immediate dispatch from the Almighty, but now that he knew conclusively that ghosts were real, a little direct communication had been worth a try.

Alva pushed himself up, staggered to his feet, and made his way out of the ruins of the house, carefully ignoring the lingering smell of smoke.

* * *

  
"If what you say is true, you could have_ died_." The monsignor slammed a hand down onto his desk, hard enough to make them both jump. "Only a fool would have stayed in that house."

"Yes, well." Alva stared down at the file on his lap, open to a fading black and white photograph of a young girl. On the white border surrounding the photo, someone had written in a slanted hand, _Alice, 1901_.

She looked much as he remembered her: her hair gathered in careful ringlets, her dress edged with lace. Even in the photograph, she looked solemn, unsmiling.

Alva cleared his throat. "Have you had adequate time to examine the evidence I presented?" The monsignor was silent for so long that Alva finally looked up, impatient. "Monsignor?"

"Father Keel," the monsignor said, his tone becoming carefully neutral, "there's no proof here, merely your observations. And even if there _were_ proof—" He hesitated, his gaze sliding away. Whatever he had to say, he didn't want to meet Alva's eyes as he said it. "Well, a haunting like this is hardly a miracle -- surely you understand that. Something like this isn't God's work."

Alice reliving her own death -- it wasn't precisely a blessing, for her _or_ those who bore witness. Nonetheless— "What are you saying, exactly? That it's the work of the Devil?"

"Yes, obviously that's what I'm saying." The monsignor looked a bit embarrassed, as though giving the credit to Satan reflected badly on him personally. "Whatever possessed you to attempt to give a ghost Last Rites, Alva? Much less an _exorcism_—"

"I believe my report clearly states that I did not, in fact, attempt an exorcism," Alva objected.

The monsignor tapped the pages on his desk. "You considered it."

"The house was on fire," Alva said, his gaze returning to the photo on his lap. "I considered everything."

"Your report also notes that you don't know _how_ to do an exorcism," the monsignor said,

Alva badly needed to collect his thoughts. He wasn't entirely sure what he'd expected when he'd delivered his report, but this wasn't it.

"I apologize," he said, rubbing at his jaw. "I must have missed exorcism day at seminary."

The monsignor didn't bother to respond to that; evidently he wasn't going to indulge Alva with an argument about the ridiculousness of the conversation they were having. He clearly wasn't having any trouble accepting the things Alva had seen, which made Alva wonder just what sort of reports his predecessors had filed.

Alva closed the file and slid to the edge of his chair, lightly tapping the file against the desk. "Monsignor, I don't believe in the Devil. I don't believe that something like this is the work of a malevolent force in opposition to God."

The monsignor gave him a tired smile. "What do you think it was, then? God? Do you think God would do a thing like that, Father Keel?"

"I think it's true what they say." Alva rose, tucking the file under one arm. "God works in mysterious ways."

"Thank you," the monsignor said, his lips thinning; he likely thought Alva was being glib. "That will be all."

Alva closed the door of the monsignor's office behind him and stood there in the corridor, at a loss. He wasn't sure how to proceed. He knew from prior experience that there wasn't one person he could talk to about the things he'd seen who would believe him; he hadn't even expected the monsignor to believe him.

He needed a quiet place to be alone with his thoughts, somewhere he was guaranteed not to be disturbed.

* * *

The rectory had an unusually large collection of reference volumes on science and the paranormal, owing to the fact that it also housed _him_ \-- or, more precisely, the priest in his position. The collection varied according to the interests of his predecessors; one had spent a small fortune on physics texts, and another had collected works on near-death experiences. Alva was beginning to make his own mark on the collection with a growing subset of texts on communication with the dead, which certainly seemed to be evolving into his specialty.

He knew all of those books as intimately as the Bible; he didn't have to open them to know that there wasn't anything in them on ghost fires. Still, it was comforting to go there and pull a few books off the shelves, to at least make a show of doing research.

He needed to fall back on old habits, on routines that were safe. Research was the safest thing he knew.

Alva settled in near the library window and made a go at reading one of the more banal NDE texts. White light, a tunnel: they all said the same thing. He was fairly certain that these books were written on a formula, and that the man who'd collected them had never seen an actual miracle. He'd likely just disproved false miracles, one after another, exactly as Alva had in the year since seminary. Even Alva himself, who had seen -- or rather, heard -- extraordinary things, had begun to suspect that there were no true miracles after all; the evidence against them was rather daunting. He'd found himself wondering if he'd hallucinated his Cambridge experience, or just made a mistake; perhaps he'd simply heard what he'd wanted to hear.

He wondered if his line of work eventually disabused everyone of the notion that miracles were real.

After what he'd seen, he wasn't entirely sure what he believed. The monsignor was right in that the ghost fire didn't seem like the sort of thing one might call a miracle; Alice had suffered, and for that matter, so had he. But then again, stigmatics also suffered, and true stigmata were inarguably miraculous.

That girl, that fire -- decades past their time, they'd been as real as anything he could definitively explain. If that wasn't a miracle, he wasn't sure what was.

"Father Keel." The monsignor stepped around a bookcase and into view. "I thought I might find you here."

Alva closed the book, trying to turn it so the monsignor couldn't see the cover; he didn't really want to be caught with something from the_ go into the light _shelf. "Is something wrong?"

"Not exactly, no." The monsignor hesitated a moment before pursing his  lips into a tiny, reluctant smile. "You're being called to Rome."

_Rome?_ That couldn't be right. "The Vatican?"

The monsignor's mouth twitched at the corners. "Very astute." He leaned forward, dropping a thin, palm-sized book onto Alva's lap. "Think of that as a parting gift."

Alva gingerly touched the book's worn leather cover. There had once been writing on the front, but the words were no longer legible. "What is it?"

"A volume on exorcism," the monsignor said, and patted Alva on the shoulder, his expression not unkind. "I have a feeling you may need to learn it."

 


End file.
